CHAPTER

TWO

Odyssey of a Loser: On the Road with Goldwater in 1964

Presidential nominees are driven men. With rare exceptions, they are impelled by lasers of ambition aimed at the greatest political prize, the White House. Barry Goldwater was an exception. Some days he wanted to be president, some days he didn’t seem to care. To flinch in a presidential campaign is usually enough to undo a candidate long before he can win nomination. Again, Goldwater was the exception. He didn’t stop at second thoughts about what he was doing; he had third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. And he talked about them. In a mismatch against the unbeatable President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Goldwater told me he didn’t expect to win. I came to believe that he didn’t really want to, that he thought his mission was accomplished when his conservative Republicans seized party power.

During his campaign that spring, Goldwater told me of visiting John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1961. He’d been invited to talk with the president, and he got to the Oval Office first. When Kennedy walked through the open door, puffing a small cigar, Goldwater was sitting in the president’s rocking chair, the one prescribed for the back pain they both suffered. Goldwater stood to greet Kennedy.

The president jabbed a finger toward him.

“Do you want this fucking job?” he asked the Arizona conservative, whose supporters already were preparing a challenge for it.

“No,” said Goldwater, “not in my right mind.”

Kennedy laughed humorlessly.

“Well,” he said, “I thought I had a good thing going. Up until this morning.” It was the day the Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba’s Fidel Castro began collapsing into disaster.

I wasn’t the first to hear Goldwater recount that story, and certainly not the last. He told it with variations over the rest of his political career, and by the time he wrote his memoirs, what began as an ironic anecdote had become a turning point in his own thinking about the presidency.

Goldwater seldom told quite the same story twice. His variations made him a political reporter’s dream and a manager’s nightmare. Campaign handlers want their candidates to sell themselves and their proposals by repetition. That bored Goldwater, and he balked at it. We talked about it early in his campaign and he said that if he had to make the same speech over and over again every day, he’d go nuts before the election. The senator said what he thought, which sometimes changed. No hobgoblin consistency worried him. He was accused of shooting from the hip, but he wasn’t always that careful.

Goldwater tried to follow instructions and avoid making off-the-cuff headlines, but he never really managed. I listened as he outlined his Cuba policy one day during the primary campaign and already was framing the story in my mind when he topped himself. Somebody asked him about Cuban interference with water lines into the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Goldwater said that if Castro didn’t keep the water on, he’d send the Marines into Cuban territory to turn it on.

Forget the details of foreign policy. That was the story.

I learned one lasting, if painful, lesson early in that campaign by blowing the lead on Goldwater’s first primary season news conference in New Hampshire. He said that intercontinental ballistic missiles were not reliable, that if he became president he wouldn’t trust ICBMs, and that manned bombers were the only certain way to guarantee nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union.

Prepping for the Goldwater assignment, I’d read his views on such topics, and that included his disdain for the ICBM. He’d said the same thing months before so it was old stuff, and I didn’t include it in my story. My lead was on a new and, I thought, far more inflammatory statement he had made, accusing Johnson of trying to make the assassination of Kennedy into a political issue to ride in the 1964 campaign. Bad choice. The Pentagon turned the ICBM into the issue—and the story of the day—by denouncing and denying what Goldwater had said. I got an irate call from a Washington editor demanding to know why I hadn’t reported the ICBM story that had the Pentagon in an uproar. I’d figured there was no hurry because it was stuff he’d said the year before, but I learned better. After that I followed a simple rule. My lead was the most interesting thing I learned or heard that day. It was my job to know everything possible about the candidate and his philosophy and background, and to write for readers who did not and who wanted to know what Barry Goldwater had said and done today, regardless of what he’d said the year before. The background was valuable when a candidate reversed himself and that became part of the story. But getting bogged down in it was a mistake.

I spent thirteen months covering Goldwater’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and the White House. In an odd way, I owe the assignment to the candidate. When he met Wes Gallagher, the chief executive of the AP, at a cocktail reception in New York in 1963, Goldwater complained that we didn’t seem to be paying much attention to him. Gallagher, who could be as impetuous as Goldwater, called my boss in Washington the next day and ordered me assigned to cover the senator. Presto, I was a full-time presidential campaign reporter. Right place right time beats career planning any day.

I’d been in that right place in Hyannisport when Kennedy was nominated and elected, getting assignments to go to the Cape and work as junior partner with the reporters who covered politics and the White House for the AP. By then, I knew that I wanted to make my career in Washington, and the JFK stories gave me a boost toward that goal. I was working among the men whose bylines I’d admired, and envied. They were reporters of skill, experience, and, I learned, stamina I could not match. One Friday night, I stayed up with them until the motel bar closed at 2:00 A.M., then staggered to bed with a wakeup call for 6:00 because I had to go back to my Boston assignments and cover a football game at Harvard that afternoon. The Harvard Band boasted the world’s biggest bass drum. I believed it that day; I felt as though it was booming inside my hungover head. The press box was atop the stadium, up flight after flight of concrete steps, with no elevator. I finally got to my place, opened my portable typewriter, and set about my game day duties. It wasn’t much of a game so the story was routine—until the Harvard quarterback, touted as an All-America prospect, broke his leg in the second quarter. Suddenly, instead of a nothing game it was a major sports story. That meant I had to trudge down all those stairs to the field and get to the locker room to find out what had happened, then climb all the way back up to write the story and send it to the bureau. And the band was back at it with that drum. I made it, did my job, and learned not to act as though there was no tomorrow when the drinks were flowing in the hotel bar.

One Saturday in Hyannisport, Marv Arrowsmith, the AP White House correspondent, told me that I could write the main JFK story for the Sunday newspapers. I’d usually been relegated to stakeouts and side pieces, so that was a plum. I wrote the story, filed it by Western Union, and went into the restaurant where Arrowsmith was having lunch. He started chewing me out, saying that Sunday papers had early deadlines and that I was supposed to be writing the story instead of delaying it for a lunch break. “I’ve already done the story,” I told him rather timidly. He didn’t see how I could have written and filed a solid story in so little time, and he went back to the pressroom to make sure it was okay. He came back shaking his head with a wry smile, told me the story was fine and said I was faster than he’d thought. High praise for a wire service man, especially one as green as I was.

Contacts like that got me onto the list of prospects for the Washington bureau. And it didn’t hurt that Arrowsmith was promoted to the No. 2 job in Washington the next year.

I was transferred from the Boston bureau to Washington in October 1961. I worked the late night shift for more than a year, a job that involved answering queries and complaints from newspapers dissatisfied with the stories they’d received from us, and trying to match stories other news outfits had beaten us on. That often meant waking up an official or a government spokesman in the middle of the night and trying to get the information from someone who was annoyed or angry at the call. It was Washington, but it was inside work; a desk job with no time for reporting and not much for writing. I was liberated from the night desk and assigned to cover the House of Representatives in 1963.

The House was a fascinating place of party rivalries and conflicting personalities, with leaders trying to orchestrate action out of the dissonance. Seniority ruled, usually southern Democratic seniority. The committee chairmen were the lords, ruling lesser congressmen with their monopoly on information and preferential treatment. One of them was Clarence Cannon of Missouri, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, master of the money. He didn’t talk to reporters, and when he talked to the House you seldom could understand him. It was English uttered incomprehensibly, on purpose I thought, so that nobody would challenge him in debate. Even the Congressional Record transcribers couldn’t make it out. When he spoke, the next day’s record would read “Mr. Cannon addressed the House. His remarks will appear hereafter.” They never came. I was covering the debate on a defense appropriations bill one day when Cannon uttered several quotable sentences that I actually understood. I put them in the lead of my story and had an exclusive; my competitors hadn’t been paying attention, figuring it would be unintelligible. I can’t remember the words in detail, but he was talking about putting more money into the already-bristling missile arsenal of the Cold War.

The titans of the House scorned the Senate and chafed at the attention senators got in the press. When Representative Emmanuel Celler of New York was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he complained about it graphically. “If I took a leak off the Capitol steps, you’d write a sentence,” he told a group of reporters one day. “If a senator did it, you’d write paragraphs describing the beauty of the arc.”

Cannon and an equally superannuated Senate counterpart, Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, made the rivalry between the chambers part of the Capitol architecture when they were chairmen of the two appropriations committees. After each house had passed its version of an appropriations bill, delegations representing the House and Senate met to negotiate final terms to be passed and sent to the White House. But Cannon balked at even stepping across the line between the House side of the Capitol and the Senate side, where the room numbers carried the S prefix. And Hayden wouldn’t agree to meet on the House side. That blocked final action on appropriations bills until wiser, younger leaders agreed that a room in the middle designated neither H nor S was the way out. The east side of the Capitol was being renovated at the time and one of the new rooms was numbered EF—east front—100. They could confer there without bruising either chairman’s ego, and they did.

My boss at the House was a veteran congressional reporter named Bill Arbogast. He knew everything and everybody up there. His vantage was the press gallery, usually the card table, where idling reporters and staffers played nonstop games of hearts and gin rummy. The office of the Foreign Affairs Committee was just outside the gallery door, and when the chairman keeled over and died of a heart attack in the hallway, Arbogast was close by. Legend has it that he said “Hold the hand,” got the story, filed it, and went back to the card table.

I spent less than a year covering the House before I was sent out with Goldwater. It was a dream job for a twenty-nine-year-old reporter. In a way, the AP became part of my name. I marked my press badge “Mears AP” and before long, people on the campaign were calling me “Mearsap.”

At an icy street rally in Concord, New Hampshire, I wrote with a shivering hand when Goldwater began his primary campaign in January 1964 by declaring that the Bay of Pigs invasion would have succeeded in overthrowing Castro had the Cuban refugee force gotten the U.S. air cover they thought was coming. Elect him president, Goldwater said, and he would try it again and get it right, training a new force to invade, arming them, and sending U.S. warplanes to back them. He wouldn’t say why he thought a second try would do any better in convincing Cubans to overthrow the Castro regime, only that more force would succeed. That was typical Goldwater, always angered at the warmonger tag his rivals applied, always ready with a hard-line proposal to help them make the label stick.

Goldwater was an opponent, not an advocate. His proposals were few, his solutions fewer. He ran to take conservative command of the Republican Party, his target since 1960. When Goldwater endorsed Nixon at the Republican convention that year, he told his followers “Let’s grow up, conservatives . . . if we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday.”

Someday was supposed to be 1964. But there was a familiar obstacle in the way of the conservative movement: the eastern Republican establishment that long had dominated party councils. It was personified in New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, old line, old money, old power, initially the 1964 favorite over Goldwater, the conservative frontier upstart.

“Sometimes I think the country would be better off if we could just saw off the eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea,” Goldwater once said. The line was replayed by his opponents as an example of his divisiveness, although he uttered it not as a politician but as a Phoenix businessman dealing with balky New York investors. Which is not to say that he wouldn’t have preferred to see Rockefeller’s New York put to sea.

The conservatives couldn’t manage that, but Rockefeller’s personal life boosted Goldwater’s political stock before the campaign for the nomination began. The governor had divorced his wife of twenty-three years and was remarried in the spring of 1963 to a woman who had just split with her husband. Her nickname was Happy, now Happy Rockefeller. The political impact was not happy for the governor, who slipped behind Goldwater in the precampaign polls on the next year’s nomination.

The political show in the first half of 1964 was all Republican, a bitter intramural struggle between Goldwater and Rockefeller. It began in New Hampshire, where the senator and the governor each spent the better part of a month campaigning for the first primary. Rockefeller came with money and skilled managers. Goldwater came without a game plan. At first he held almost constant news conferences, a bad idea given his tendency to ad-lib his way into controversy. He’d had foot surgery and he campaigned with his right shoe cut open to ease the pain. He limped through eighteen speeches in one day I spent with him. In the lakeside town of Moultonboro, we pulled up to an elementary school where Goldwater found his audience to be third-and fourth-grade students. He gave them a grandfatherly talk, then chewed out the aide who sent him to talk to kids who wouldn’t be voting for years. It turned out that the local campaign chairman had set up the appearance for her own advancement in town politics.

Rockefeller had to cope with the attacks of The Manchester Union Leader, the state’s dominant and ardently conservative newspaper, which featured almost daily front-page editorials against “the wife swapper.”

Rockefeller was a glad-handing candidate, throwing an arm around any voter in reach. “Hi ya, fella,” he would say, sometimes to women. He campaigned in platitudes; reporters devised an acronym based on one of Rocky’s recurring lines and used it to describe the message of his everyday set speech: “BOMFOG.” That meant “brotherhood of man, fatherhood of God.”

Goldwater was not into such homilies and he didn’t like the hands-on style. When his campaign sent him to the Puritan Restaurant in Concord to shake hands, he balked. “If somebody walked up to me while I was eating and stuck out his hand, I’d put my hamburger in it,” he said.

“I’m not one of those baby-kissing, handshaking, blintzel-eating candidates,” he said on the steps of the Hanover Inn, shortly after Rockefeller had breezed through town doing all of the above. “I don’t like to insult the American intelligence by thinking that slapping people on the back is going to get you votes.” Goldwater was the first presidential candidate of Jewish ancestry, and he couldn’t say “blintz” correctly.

But Rockefeller wasn’t his real rival in the New Hampshire primary. Improbably, Henry Cabot Lodge was, the sleeper candidate, ambassador in far-off Saigon, silent on politics back home. A self-starting team of young political operatives came north from Boston, set up shop on less than a shoestring, and began a campaign for write-in votes for Lodge.

In a primary day blizzard, campaigners Goldwater and Rockefeller were beaten and absentee Lodge won easily, on what I described in my story that night as a snowslide of write-in ballots.

As it turned out, that primary made no lasting difference. Another vote election day did: New Hampshire approved the first modern state lottery, legalizing a form of gambling that later would spread across most of the nation.

The permanent political imprint of the primary had nothing to do with the outcome but, rather, with the way it was reported. Eighteen minutes after the polls closed, before anyone had a chance to count and tabulate ballots the old-fashioned way, Walter Cronkite was on CBS reporting the Lodge write-in victory. I was working in an AP election-night office in a rambling, wooden hotel in Concord, surroundings as antique as our vote-counting operation turned out to be. We were set up for a standard counting operation, prepared for the familiar succession of reports on who led and by how much. It always had been done that way—first the suspense of the count, then the verdict of the votes. It would not be done that way again. The CBS report was based on instant calls from an army of vote watchers and on the outcome in selected sample precincts, and it was the future.

So began the 1964 contest among the networks to call elections first and boast about the scoop, even though it was measured in a minute or two. The networks hired legions of election night stringers to call in the vote. By the end of the primary season, the cost of getting all those people to get all those votes instantly was making the competition ruinous. And so was born the News Election Service, in which the networks, the Associated Press, and United Press International pooled their resources to count votes. For the first time, and in every national election after 1964, all the major news outlets reported the same vote numbers instead of competing to get them first.

Eventually, the pooled effort would be expanded to project outcomes on the basis of voter interviews before the ballots were counted. That seemed to be a reliable science until it proved not to be in Florida, in the 2000 election that was and will forever be too close to call with statistical certainty.

Lodge had his moment in New Hampshire; he won no more and stayed in Saigon. Goldwater and Rockefeller struggled and maneuvered all spring, to their last and decisive match in the California primary. It was an intense campaign. After an exhausting motorcade in southern California with stops for twenty-one speeches, Goldwater said “If it’s going to be like this, I quit.”

There were legions of Goldwater girls in gold and brilliant blue outfits to brighten the rallies. One day in Los Angeles, a network colleague told me to watch and he’d prove the power of television. He summoned about thirty Goldwater girls and got them to form a circle. On his command they circled left, then right, while a camerman focused on them. There was no film in the camera.

In solidly conservative Orange County, south of Los Angeles, John Wayne introduced Goldwater at an outdoor rally by denouncing the reporters he said were writing lies about the senator. “They’re right down there,” Wayne said, pointing at us in the press section beside the stage. Some in the crowd pushed forward, literally growling at us. There were no casualties.

But for all the campaign intensity, Rockefeller’s personal life may have tipped the outcome to Goldwater’s hard-line victory. Three days before the primary, Rockefeller went home to New York for the birth of his son. The baby pictures revived the personal issue and certainly cost Rockefeller votes in a California election he barely lost.

Even with Rockefeller finished, there were pockets of Republican resistance bent on stopping Goldwater. In an odd way, the “stop Goldwater” movement included former President Eisenhower, although he said vehemently that he wasn’t part of it. Eisenhower said he wanted an open Republican convention, which meant other candidates would stand a chance, while insisting that he did not oppose the nomination of Goldwater. That was contradictory because Goldwater had more than enough delegate votes to win, closing the choice of the convention before it began. There could not be an open convention unless Goldwater was stopped.

That was obvious, but Ike didn’t see it, or at least wouldn’t admit it. I went with Marv Arrowsmith, who had covered the Eisenhower White House, to interview the former president at his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and he stuck to his contradictory position. He wasn’t against Goldwater, he was just for an open convention. When I persisted in pointing out the inconsistency, he got angry and Arrowsmith changed the subject. The only time I ever met Dwight Eisenhower I made him mad.

The Republican convention in San Francisco was bitter and divided. The conservatives booed and jeered to drown out Rockefeller when he tried to deliver his convention speech. They cheered, wildly, when Goldwater essentially read moderates out of the campaign, saying that he didn’t expect support from “those who do not believe in our cause.” A united Republican front couldn’t have defeated Lyndon Johnson. A bitterly divided one wasn’t even competitive.

Through it all, Johnson and his Democrats just watched, which was all they needed to do. No need to tear at the Republicans when they were tearing themselves apart, to nominate a man more bent on taking control of the party than of the White House.

Goldwater varied the story a bit in his retellings of the 1961 White House visit with a fuming President Kennedy as the Bay of Pigs operation unraveled, but one part of the recollection stood: The JFK expletive about the lousy job of being president never was deleted.

Yet, in his 1988 memoir, Goldwater described the episode as a turning point in his own thinking about the presidency because, he said, Kennedy had asked for his advice and he’d given it—get tougher against Castro. For the first time, he wrote, he came to believe “that I had the toughness of mind and will to lead the country.”

That doesn’t fit with his other ruminations about the office. Before he ran, Goldwater said “I’m not even sure that I’ve got the brains to be president of the United States.” He won the Republican presidential nomination shortly after saying publicly that he couldn’t win the election.

When Goldwater invited a newcomer to his staff to his home in Phoenix, he told the astonished presidential campaign recruit: “You’re looking at the one man in the United States who doesn’t want to be president.” The guy had to wonder what kind of a campaign he’d joined.

The official period of mourning for Kennedy had just ended when Goldwater began his campaign. President Johnson was the third man to hold the office within three years and the voters were not about to change leaders again. Goldwater knew that and told me so, although off the record.

After the trauma of assassination, people wanted stability, not change, especially change so abrupt as Goldwater advocated. He was pushing for a sharp turn to the right. He wanted to repeal social programs dating from the New Deal. He brandished U.S. nuclear power in careless words that enabled the Democrats to depict him as a warmonger. He described battlefield atomic artillery as “conventional nuclear weapons,” and what he said scared people.

He wasn’t scary in person. When I wrote his obituary in 1998, I described him as cantankerously cordial. Like many of the conservative politicians I knew over the years, he was generous when he saw somebody in trouble or need. He wanted to help individuals when he saw their plight one-on-one, perhaps as much as he wanted to stop government programs to assist masses of people in need.

No candidate is truly drafted to run for president, but Goldwater was pushed to the task by conservative activists who saw him as their one hope of dominating the Republican Party. It irked him when he had to campaign hard.

Johnson was the opposite; he thrived on campaigning, couldn’t seem to get enough of the cheers and adulation of the crowds. Kennedy had chosen Johnson for vice president after defeating him for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. I was at Hyannisport when Johnson arrived there for the first postconvention meeting between the 1960 running mates. “Ah’ve come to see mah friend and leader,” Johnson said, accentuating the Texan amid the clipped accents of Cape Cod. But the suspicion persisted that he thought the ticket was backward, that he belonged on top. Now he was determined to put the LBJ brand on a White House he’d inherited. He wanted a mountainous mandate in 1964, a landslide to contrast with the razor thin margin of Kennedy’s victory in 1960. He wasn’t only running against Goldwater; he was running to eclipse the JFK legend with his own.

Vice presidents have to submerge their egos and that was no easy task for Johnson, who had dominated the Senate as majority leader before he joined the 1960 ticket. After he won the White House for himself, his Texas ego thrived. A colleague recalled an off-the-record session over drinks on Air Force One in which Johnson delivered his version of modern history. No note taking was permitted, so he only could paraphrase the president from memory. Look at the world today, Johnson said. Churchill, dead. Stalin, deGaulle, Kennedy, all dead. And—voice rising now—I’m the king.

Goldwater said he had decided to run against Kennedy in the fall of 1963. He told me it would have been a clear test of conservative versus liberal in a race with civil rules. He said later that he and Kennedy had agreed on an unprecedented arrangement in which the two nominees would conduct regular debates, not only appearing together but also traveling together, all to dramatize the clear choice awaiting the voters. No one ever confirmed that story and I always wondered whether such an unlikely campaign deal was real, but Goldwater told it often in the years after his presidential defeat, and it became part of the lore. Al Gore cited the supposed Goldwater-Kennedy plan as precedent when he dared his challenger to constant debates in the 2000 primary campaign.

Goldwater said that after Kennedy was assassinated, he decided “to heck with the president thing.” He always said he’d liked and respected Kennedy, although the rhetoric didn’t sound that way. He had, for example, accused Kennedy of running the worst foreign policy in American history, “wall-eyed . . . cross-eyed . . . and blind.”

Kennedy, in turn, thought Goldwater was the weakest Republican he might face for reelection in 1964. He was far more worried about Rockefeller, the liberal Republican who could take centrist votes away from the Democratic ticket.

But Kennedy did not live to run, and Goldwater, oddly, claimed that he then decided not to run himself because he despised and distrusted Johnson. That seemed to me to be all the more reason to challenge the man, but Goldwater said he didn’t want to be involved in a nasty campaign and Johnson would wage one. When he campaigned against Johnson, Goldwater wasn’t sparing with his own nastiness. He called the president a treacherous hypocrite and the phoniest man he knew. The senator could be nasty, too.

Long afterward, Goldwater wrote that Johnson made him sick. The contempt was mutual. “He’s just as nutty as a fruitcake,” Johnson said in a telephone conversation early in 1964, recorded on the LBJ tapes. He pretended he wasn’t campaigning at that point, just being president—which is, of course, the most effective campaign a president can wage. When he got around to campaigning openly, Johnson called Goldwater heartless, extreme, and dangerous.

It was a campaign with the election outcome never really in doubt, even though Johnson was given to wailing privately that it was and that Democrats who disputed him risked turning the presidency over to Goldwater. Even so, the 1964 campaign left lasting landmarks.

One was the beginning of the marathon presidential campaign. The conservatives who captured the Republican nomination for Goldwater worked at it for more than two years, operating below the political radar to take over the party in a quiet revolution. Their operation foretold the years-long campaigns that would become standard.

The 1964 conservative takeover was fashioned in a sort of political guerrilla war. The Goldwater Republicans began it by capturing control in neighborhood GOP meetings, the caucuses that are the first step in choosing the delegates who vote on presidential nominations. A handful of activists could win at that level. Party veterans suddenly found themselves outnumbered by conservatives who hadn’t shown up before. A New York political tactician named F. Clinton White managed the operation, building a pyramid from neighborhood caucuses to county and state conventions to the Republican National Convention. The primaries against Rockefeller were political theater, but conservative command was won offstage. By the time the party’s old guard figured out the takeover strategy they couldn’t stop it.

Before national convention time, Goldwater had the delegate commitments he needed to win the nomination and was unstoppable unless liberal and centrist Republicans could pry loose enough convention votes to deny him. They couldn’t, because the Goldwater delegates were not sometime supporters, they were conservative true believers, unmoving and unmovable. In time, conventions would become TV pageants, celebrations, and political reunions. The 1964 Republican convention wasn’t a reunion; it was a divisive show of conservative brawn. At earlier conventions, delegates were usually the same faces every four years, many of them the old-line Republican power brokers of New York and the East Coast. But three-quarters of the 1964 Republican delegates at the Cow Palace in San Francisco were strangers, people who had not been at the 1960 convention.

So the party fractured, with Goldwater and his supporters on one side and the old moderate GOP establishment on the other. Goldwater seemed to revel in the disintegration. After he was nominated he told his Republican opponents he didn’t care about their support in the fall. He made the obligatory rounds of state caucuses during the convention, but preferred to spend his time talking on a ham radio installed at his Mark Hopkins Hotel suite. “This is K7UGA portable six, from the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel,” he’d say. “The handle is Barry—Baker Able Robert Robert Yankee.” He talked with ham operators from as far off as Australia. He still felt cooped up, so he slipped out of the hotel, eluding reporters and the convention crowds by using a cobwebbed tunnel that led from the hotel to a secluded exit atop Nob Hill, where an unmarked police car waited to take him to San Mateo County airport and a rented plane. Goldwater went flying three times that week and told me later that he had buzzed the Cow Palace while the convention there was getting ready to nominate him for president.

Wes Gallagher, the top man at AP, was convinced that Goldwater was going to be a troublesome candidate to cover, one who would try to deny things he said when they turned out to be damaging. In fact, he didn’t do that. He’d talk his way off the reservation but he lived with what he said, although he sometimes tried to ignore troublesome statements that were on the record, or claimed that he had been misinterpreted by reporters. But since Gallagher thought the AP was going to be arguing with him over quotes, he ordered me at the San Francisco convention to carry a tape recorder during the campaign, get everything Goldwater said on tape, and keep it for proof when an AP story was challenged. But the small, handy cassette recorders that would become standard equipment for reporters in later campaigns had not yet been invented. The recorder Gallagher wanted me to carry was bulky and hard to handle. You couldn’t take notes and run it at the same time. Besides, you had to thread each reel of tape into it, which defied my less than minimal technical ability. AP reporter Rob Wood, who worked with me on the Goldwater convention story, showed up at the Mark Hopkins Hotel with the thing. I called the convention bureau, which was at the foot of Nob Hill, and said I wouldn’t use it because I couldn’t be a reporter and a sound man at the same time. I was told that I had to because Gallagher wanted it. When I tried to protest to Gallagher, I was told he was on his way back to New York. So I could not lodge an appeal. Instead, I sent Wood back down Nob Hill to the AP convention bureau with the hated tape recorder, figuring that it was like a subpoena; if it hadn’t been served it didn’t count. Wood trudged back down the hill with it. He was ordered to deliver it to me again. He was smart enough to know I’d only balk again, so I saw no more of the recorder until I got on Goldwater’s chartered campaign plane. It was in my seat. I surrendered and carried it around for a while, but I never did figure out how to use it to any good purpose. The truth is that I never recorded a word on the thing.

Goldwater had long since riveted himself into positions that guaranteed all but like-minded conservatives would shun his ticket. Civil rights was a major one. Goldwater said his aim was neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated one but “to preserve a free society.” The message was clearer than the logic. Goldwater cast one of the twenty-seven Senate votes against the 1964 civil rights act barring racial discrimination in hiring and segregation in restaurants and hotels. (In his memoir, he wrote that his was the only vote against it, but then, he was given to exaggeration.) He was a states’ rights conservative, and that was music to the Old South holdouts against civil rights laws. The Goldwater ticket opened the first cracks in what had been the solid South of white, conservative Democrats since the era of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Five of the six states Goldwater carried against Johnson were in the South, foretelling the realignment of party power that would make the region a Republican base in elections to come.

Earlier in 1964, Governor George C. Wallace, who had cried “Segregation forever” as an Alabama campaigner, took his message north into three Democratic primaries and “white backlash” became part of the political lexicon. Wallace peaked at 43 percent of the primary vote in Maryland. Interviewing Wallace later in his Montgomery office, I listened to his boasts about his 1964 campaign, which came with visual aids. At least it was supposed to be an interview. Wallace did monologues; a question asked usually was a question ignored. He pulled out a sheaf of photos of campaign rallies in the territory he’d invaded, and bragged about all the people he’d drawn to hear him. He claimed to remember the size of the crowd at the major rallies, but he saw a lot more people in the photographs than I did. “Looka this,” he’d say. “This is in Milwaukee, looka all those people come to hear me.”

In Maryland, Wallace was leading midway through the primary night vote. Afterward, he told of the lead that vanished. First, he said, those TV people said he was winning. But then they announced that they were going to recapitulate the vote, and he lost. “I don’t know what re . . . cap . . . it . . . u . . . late means,” he’d drawl, dragging out the syllables, “but if anybody ever tells you they’ fixin’ to recapitulate on you, watch out.”

While Wallace and Goldwater demonstrated the holdout power of the right, the 1964 election turned the government to the left, delivering Johnson’s Great Society social programs as Democrats took overwhelming command of Congress.

But even while that was happening, Ronald Reagan emerged from Hollywood and television as a champion Republican fund-raiser, beginning the political rise that would one day deliver in his name the conservative presidency Goldwater could only talk about.

Reagan the movie actor had become Reagan the television host and performer on the rubber chicken lecture circuit. In the final days of the campaign, the Goldwater organization bought thirty minutes of national television time for a fund-raising address, intending to have the nominee use it for a Reagan-style speech to rally conservative troops and money.

But Goldwater told them a speech like that wasn’t his style, overruling the advisers who wanted him on camera and saying Reagan could deliver it more effectively. “You’re more eloquent than I am,” he told Reagan. That was an understatement. Goldwater’s speech-making style was as bland as his words were fiery. Reagan was the performer, and the Goldwater speech was his debut as a national political figure.

When he was elected governor of California in 1966, Reagan telephoned Goldwater to say that it wouldn’t have happened without his 1964 sendoff. But the conservative tie didn’t bind when Reagan challenged President Gerald R. Ford for renomination in 1976 and Goldwater supported the president. Nancy Reagan had a long memory and Goldwater, back in the Senate, never made the list for White House social affairs after Reagan became president in 1981.

The Vietnam War was threaded through the 1964 campaign, a shadowy issue begetting the deceptions that would tear the Democrats apart four years later. The war was escalating, and Johnson got his franchise to intensify it with the almost unanimous vote of Congress, Goldwater included, for retaliation against purported North Vietnamese torpedo firings on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Nevertheless, Johnson promised, “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Within months of Johnson’s reelection, he did so. It led later to a Goldwater story about a supporter of his saying, “They told me that if I voted for Barry there would be a half-million American troops in Vietnam. I did, and there are.”

But Vietnam did not become a major issue in Johnson’s campaign with Goldwater, who seemed to have two minds about the subject. At one point he said it was too divisive to be made a political topic, at others he accused Johnson of lying about Vietnam and demanded an accounting.

I remember the incongruity of scene and subject the day Goldwater and we reporters covering him flew in light planes to the unpaved airstrip of an orchard town in northern California. While a warm spring breeze blew across acres of peach blossoms, the scent perfuming the air, Goldwater told townspeople that the United States was risking disaster and stalemate in Vietnam. He said it would become another Korean War or worse unless heavier American weapons were unsheathed and U.S. bombers struck the Communists. Frightening prospects, told in a mild, almost singsong style, no raised voice, no sound of alarm. An awful war was escalating, but in the election of 1964 Vietnam was all but irrelevant.

The war the Democrats wanted to talk about wasn’t Vietnam. It was the imaginary war they conjured by charging that a President Goldwater was so reckless as to risk nuclear conflict. Goldwater’s loose-cannon talk helped them draw the image. The Democrats reinforced it with television attack ads linking Goldwater to mushroom clouds and nuclear fallout, the first of the negative TV commercials that would become lamentable fixtures in later campaigns. None were more adroit or more devastating than the 1964 Democratic ads implying that Goldwater would risk nuclear war.

Goldwater’s was the last of the freestyle presidential campaigns. There was no map. Literally, at times. On one of those light plane campaign flights, the pilot lost his bearings and had to find a highway he recognized to show him the route to the airfield. I got an early lesson in Goldwater’s habits aloft when I flew from Phoenix to California with him in a twin-engine plane, and the clouds closed in as we headed through a mountain pass. He nudged me and pointed out the window at a snowy mountain crag that pierced the cloud bank above us and, it seemed to me, distressingly close. I paled. He laughed.

Goldwater relied on strategists and advisers short on national campaign experience but long on personal friendship, loyalty, and conservative ideology. It was an operation innocent of the hired consultants who would come to guide the decisions of nominees and would become the permanent establishment of presidential campaigns.

Nor did Goldwater worry much about polls. He might have stayed home if he had. He was down to Johnson by two to one or worse all year. He told me the polls didn’t make any difference; he was going to speak his piece and run his party.

Goldwater later claimed that he had made campaign proposals even though he knew they would be unpopular, such as when he advocated making Social Security voluntary, to the distress of retirees, and when he called in Nashville for the sale of TVA power plants to private investors. But he set those political traps for himself long before he ran for president, in his speeches and writings as Mr. Conservative. As Mr. Candidate, he actually tried to temper them, saying that he did not believe in changing contracts like Social Security and that, besides, Congress would not let any president do things like making the system voluntary or selling off TVA. Over the decades, versions of both notions became less radical and more acceptable, at least for debate. But in 1964, they were sitting targets for Johnson and the Democrats.

So were Goldwater’s observations about nuclear weapons. He said in 1963 that U.S. NATO commanders should have the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in Europe in case of Communist attack. Scary talk, which he had to defend and try to explain. Eventually, he said he meant only the Supreme Allied Commander, not his subordinates. Later still, he said that Johnson and his predecessors already had delegated that authority to the commander—singular—and that his statement reflected what already had been done without public notice.

Explanations aside, raising the nuclear prospect only added to qualms and outright fears about the candidate on the right, handing political ammunition to the Democrats. In a television interview that spring, Goldwater talked of blocking Communist supply lines in Vietnam with nuclear weapons. “There have been several suggestions made, I don’t think we would use any of them, but defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done.” That was inaccurately reported as a Goldwater proposal for the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He hadn’t proposed it, he protested. No, he had not. He’d speculated about it, which was problem enough. Careless words about nuclear weapons only dug the political hole deeper for the senator who once had talked about lobbing one into the men’s room at the Kremlin.

He was a dangerous radical, Johnson would say. “Whose thumb do you want on that button?” became a regular question in Democratic campaign speeches.

Personally, the menacing zealot the Democrats depicted was an engaging, friendly man, a talented amateur photographer, a tinkerer who delighted in gadgets like his automatic sunup flag-raising device in Phoenix. When a colleague went to Goldwater’s house to interview him, he was directed to the swimming pool but saw no sign of the senator, who liked to use underwater breathing gear to lounge at the bottom. He finally surfaced and the interview proceeded.

Goldwater was at home in and around airplanes, a pilot since World War II. He delighted in his campaign-chartered American Airlines 727, christened Yai-Bi-Kin, which is Navajo for “House in the Sky.” But even the cockpit veteran was startled by one maneuver, on takeoff from Bristol, Tennessee. The jet began climbing and suddenly turned sharply, roaring back and down toward the runway. It was unnerving, even when the plane leveled just off above the runway. By then the more devout passengers were deep in prayer. I told my terrified seatmate that we probably weren’t going to crash because they hadn’t turned on the no-smoking sign, and if we were really in trouble, they would have denied us a last cigarette. Goldwater got up from his seat near the cockpit and braced himself to walk the few steps to the door. He came out laughing. The pilot had buzzed the runway on a dare from a friend in the control tower. “That was to separate the men from the boys,” Goldwater said on the loudspeaker. Most of us sided with the boys.

The myth is that there was at least a cold war between Goldwater and the reporters who covered him. There was not. To the regulars, a half-dozen of us who reported his campaign from the beginning, he was as friendly as Nixon had been aloof. He entertained us in his home in Phoenix. He arranged a trip to Nogales, Sonora, for dinner at The Cave, his favorite Mexican restaurant, once a Pancho Villa hideout. That excursion wound up in the middle of the night at the Phoenix airport with Goldwater and his wife sharing swigs from a bottle of tequila with four reporters.

After his landslide defeat, Goldwater told those of us who had traveled with him and reported on his campaign that we had treated him fairly, even though he thought, correctly, that most of us disagreed with much of what he said. To a professional political reporter, disagreement makes no difference. You keep your personal views out of the coverage and out of the story if you’re any good at the job. Goldwater said it was the columnists and commentators, “that end of the press,” who had misrepresented him. “I have never seen or heard in my life such vitriolic, unbased attacks on one man as have been directed to me,” he said.

There was a special camaraderie among the reporters who shared the rigors, rewards, and plain fun of traveling with the candidates. It’s the only work I know in which the boss gives you a credit card and some cash and sends you roaming around the country to write stories that are all but guaranteed to be on front pages every day. It becomes a lifestyle that is hard to let go when the election is over. I remember a sort of depression after my first full-bore experience at campaign coverage. Suddenly the show that had been central to my life and work for months or longer was over and it was time to go back to the real world, covering stories, in my case on the Senate, that seemed routine compared with where I’d been. I experienced the same letdown feeling after later campaigns and elections, but by then I understood it and knew that the way to handle it was to plunge into the next story, not mope about the end of the last one.

We reporters were close friends, but no less competitive for the friendships. When you come up with a story the others don’t have, you write it hard and let them try to catch up. There’s no greater compliment for a political reporter than to have your friends show up late for dinner and cuss you out for beating them. Next time, almost certainly, one of your competitors will have the beat and you’re going to be chasing the story. But on the daily routine—checking quotes for accuracy, getting filled in on what’s happened while you’ve been off filing, for example—we took care of each other. The protective code applied when a reporter had a drink or two too many at the end of a travel day and needed a bit of help writing that night. I’d had a couple, maybe more, one night in Kentucky before I went to the pressroom to write what we called an overnight, a story summing up the day and looking ahead to tomorrow, for afternoon papers. I must have been staring at the typewriter a bit longer than usual. David Broder, the great political reporter and columnist, then with the evening Washington Star, was at work on his story across the room. Broder, who honestly fits the description of gentleman and scholar, finished his overnight piece, filed it Western Union, and then, without a word, dropped a carbon copy—we called them blacksheets—of his overnight on my desk. Just in case I needed some help in writing my own. I glanced at his copy as he left and jerked myself out of my reverie. I got to work writing my own overnight, cranked it out and filed it, and walked into the hotel bar with a copy, which I dropped on the table where Broder was relaxing. “I can write better drunk than you can sober,” I told him, laughing. He laughed, too. It wasn’t so, but it was one of my better lines. In pressroom lore, there is the story of a New York reporter who got too drunk to write while covering Harry Truman in Key West, Florida, and slumped over his typewriter. Colleagues covered for him. Three or maybe four revised their stories, put his byline on them, and filed them to his newspaper, until his editor sent back a message saying okay, enough.

There also were feuds among some reporters, some dating back years. Merriman Smith, the UPI White House man who won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963, grabbed the one radio telephone in the press car and dictated his bulletin after the shots were fired, then hogged the phone to prevent the AP’s Jack Bell from filing his story. They wrestled over it; by the time Bell got to file we already had our story on the wire, from a staff photographer who had seen Kennedy shot in the head, which was more than Smith knew. Smith said later that he wouldn’t have done it to another AP man, but with Bell, it was a grudge match. He said Bell had done a number on him years before when Smith was sent to cover Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign. Smith claimed that Bell had told Ike’s press secretary not to trust him because he wasn’t a reliable reporter. I never thought that was so; I never knew whether Bell had said it was. Whatever the gossip, it didn’t slow Smith’s career; he became the best known of White House reporters. Bell was my boss at the Senate and I traveled with him for years on political stories. He didn’t talk about what happened that day in Dallas but it haunted him. I realized that one night when the two of us were having dinner on the road, discussing the campaign we were covering and suddenly, as though talking to himself, he said, “I should have torn out that God-damned phone.” Then he went back to the conversation we’d been having.

Goldwater was a westerner who liked his guns, which would have been a Secret Service nightmare when government guards were assigned to candidates four years later. Once, when he and Peggy Goldwater entertained a few of us for lunch at their home, he got to talking about handguns with the New York Times man, Charles Mohr. While the rest of us chatted with Mrs. Goldwater over sandwiches, shots sounded at the front door, one room away. We jolted out of our chairs.

“That’s just Barry with his pistol,” Mrs. Goldwater said reassuringly. But she made him cease fire. He and Mohr had been shooting at a metal box target, a bullet trap across the driveway from his house. Goldwater acknowledged that some of his shots missed and strayed into the valley beyond. He said that seemed to bother the people at the church down there even though they were out of range, so he didn’t shoot on Sundays.

One day in Dallas, Goldwater told a veterans’ convention that the New York Times was no better than Izvestia, the Soviet newspaper. The veterans cheered and afterward, Mohr asked Goldwater what he’d meant by that slap. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you, Charlie,” Goldwater said, and dropped it. But their relationship was fractured after the election when Mohr wrote a magazine piece entitled “Requiem for a Lightweight,” about Goldwater, his campaign, and his failings. Goldwater considered it a slur and never forgave Mohr or his newspaper. When he returned to the Senate in 1969, he would not speak to Times reporters and that was his rule until he retired, three terms later.

Still, for all the conservative complaints about the “Eastern Liberal Press,” a label we reporters had put onto lapel pins as a sarcastic inside joke, Goldwater got a more than even break in his coverage. The reporters who knew him and his tendency to blurt words he didn’t intend would ask him to slow down and say what he meant. He wasn’t absolved of major missteps that way, but he got a chance to try to make himself clear in the day-to-day fare of campaigning. That could not happen now, with every public statement recorded on tape. Nor would it, given the journalistic ground rules enforced by an era of scandal and purposeful political lies. Indeed, as Goldwater climbed past the nomination into the general election campaign, the coverage intensified, and he was held to every word.

“Write what he means, not what he says,” asked Paul F. Wagner, who became Goldwater’s last, best campaign press secretary that summer. He used to call me “the damned quoter,” who just wrote things down and put them on the AP wire. That was my job, of course, and he was joking. Or at least half joking.

Wagner was the operations man when the Goldwater high command decided on an odd, and futile, policy meant to protect him from his own words. He decreed that the nominee could not be quoted directly when speaking off-the-cuff and answering questions. His news conferences would be under background rules, meaning that what he said could not be attributed to him, only to sources familiar with his thinking or other such terms of art. That way the Goldwater campaign could disown words that would have created problems. It was dishonest and it also was impossible, given the campaign setting. I challenged the rule, telling Goldwater that the AP would not report campaign statements that could not be attributed to him by name. I said that in my reporting, he’d have to run for president under his own name, not as a source. My bosses backed me up and the AP skipped some stories our competitors used.

The attempt to protect Goldwater from his own words was a failure. No candidate could run under cover in a plane full of reporters. The campaign dropped the device, but not before it produced such anomalies as a New York Times story quoting sources close to Goldwater, beside a photograph of Goldwater answering questions from reporters in his campaign plane.

Presidents and politicians still try at times to immunize themselves with background-only rules when they want to say or leak something but don’t want it attributed to them. It doesn’t work in a crowd, only when the word is whispered to one reporter or a handful of them. Even then, background strictures, meaning no name attribution, or the more restrictive off-the-record, meaning no use at all, have become fragile and often transparent in a wired political environment. The only way to be really off-the-record is to be silent and that is not what politicians do for a living.

When Goldwater began his 1964 campaign, he promised “A choice not an echo.” His campaign certainly offered that. Seldom, perhaps never, have two men so diametrically different in philosophy, style, and ambition as Goldwater and Johnson been rival nominees for the White House. Johnson wanted total victory—a shutout if possible. Goldwater was just running. “I don’t know if any man has a burning desire for this job,” he told me a month before his nomination. “It’s the worst job you can have.”

LBJ didn’t think so, although he, like Goldwater, sometimes threatened to quit the whole business. Goldwater didn’t like the work of running or the workload heaped upon him. Johnson reveled in both but he couldn’t stand Democratic dissent against him. When a dispute over a black challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation threatened to disrupt the Democratic National Convention, Johnson threatened to quit the campaign. “This will throw the nation into quite an uproar, sir,” George Reedy, his press secretary, said, mildly understating the political upheaval that would have caused had Johnson really meant it. Johnson was outraged by Democratic disputes. “Why in the living hell do they want to hand—shovel—Goldwater fifteen states? . . . If they want to elect Goldwater, that’s not going to make me cry one bit,” he cried. It made no difference that he was overwhelmingly ahead in the polls, on his way to a November landslide. He wanted unanimity.

“They think I want great power,” he told Reedy in a recorded Oval Office telephone conversation reported in Michael R. Beschloss’s book Taking Charge. “And what I want is great solace and a little love. That’s all I want.”

For a politician, the greatest solace is votes. He had more than enough of those and everybody knew it. The White House was going to remain Democratic against any Republican challenger. Goldwater’s nomination guaranteed it. Johnson wanted unity and harmony. Goldwater didn’t worry about either. Nominated, he told his Republican opponents they could just go sit out the campaign. Then came the defiant declaration that guaranteed the left-right split would be a chasm: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

“Extremism in pursuit of the presidency,” Johnson called it.

The Vietnam question never quite went away but it never became the issue it should have been. In a more perfect political world, 1964 would have been the campaign and election in which to debate the war, before instead of after U.S. forces were fully committed, before intervention expanded into the agonizing conflict of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At the Republican convention, Goldwater said Vietnam should be a campaign issue. “Don’t try to sweep this under the rug,” he challenged Johnson. But the president did just that, and, strangely, Goldwater helped him.

When the war did come up, Johnson denounced Goldwater as belligerent. He said it was easier to start wars than to end them and that a policy of bombing North Vietnam would cost American lives and lead to ground warfare. It did, of course, but by then it was Johnson’s policy.

Despite Goldwater’s convention rhetoric, shortly after his nomination he told the president that he believed neither of them should heighten divisions about the conflict “by making Vietnam an issue in the campaign.” Goldwater said he would not do so, a mystifying commitment he didn’t really keep. Johnson obviously was delighted at the offer to keep Vietnam out of the campaign. It played to his strength by letting him hammer on concerns at home while depicting Goldwater as the potential warmaker. Goldwater let him do it, although he periodically denounced administration policy as incompetent and derelict.

Just as oddly, Goldwater announced that fall that if elected he would send Eisenhower to Vietnam to help decide U.S. policy—an echo of the former president’s own 1952 campaign pledge that he would go to Korea to deal with that war. When a Goldwater aide called me at home to tell me of the send-Ike-to-Vietnam proposal, I thought he was joking. Finally convinced that he was serious, I asked what Eisenhower thought of the idea. Oops. No answer. Typically in their haphazard operation, nobody thought to mention the Vietnam idea to Eisenhower first.

Goldwater said he had his personal talk with Johnson about Vietnam as an issue when went to the White House in late July to pledge that he would not make civil rights a campaign issue, either. His Senate vote against the civil rights act that spring had made it one. Even Goldwater’s own advisers, no fans of the civil rights movement, wanted him to vote for it because enactment was inevitable and a “no” vote would hurt his campaign.

Johnson had proposed the legislation and signed the law, overriding the last stand of the old Democratic South in the Senate. But George Wallace had demonstrated the power of the backlash vote, and despite the advance of civil rights measures, there was racial violence in American cities that summer. The whole subject was explosive.

Goldwater would claim later that he had decided the civil rights issue should be calmed and that he had decided to go see Johnson and work out a joint pledge to keep racial questions out of their campaigns. Actually, Goldwater walked into the situation inadvertently and, again, played to Johnson’s strength. The idea of a meeting between the Republican challenger and the president grew out of a reporter’s question at an airport news conference in Chicago. After Goldwater said he would do nothing as a candidate to risk worsening racial tensions, the reporter asked whether the senator thought the nominees should have a summit meeting on the issue. Goldwater answered that he would welcome the chance to discuss it with Johnson because civil rights should be “a completely quiet question” in the campaign. My story got to Washington before Goldwater did, and Johnson preempted the topic by announcing he’d be meeting his opponent at the White House. He’d even set the date.

It was an LBJ show, a sixteen-minute meeting with Goldwater after the senator had been kept waiting twice that long in the Cabinet Room. The White House issued the only report on what was said: Johnson had “reviewed the steps he had taken to avoid the incitement of racial tensions,” and the two had agreed that they were to be avoided. Goldwater was ushered out a side entrance without giving his version of the meeting that day.

Not that he could have said much anyhow. He’d gone into Johnson’s arena, and the president had shown his command. That was the image LBJ wanted: action Johnson, the man who got things done. Johnson reveled in his campaigning. “If the president gets out of his car and talks to a colored boy in New Orleans or a widow woman in Kentucky or a banker in New England, they feel pretty important,” Johnson said after striding into the crowds to touch hands to the constant dismay of his Secret Service guards.

Goldwater wouldn’t have worried them. He kept his distance. When Goldwater drew unexpected crowds, which was not often, they seemed to annoy him. We flew into a southern airport late one campaign night and there was a spontaneous crowd waiting to see the senator. Goldwater was handed a portable loudspeaker to address them, but instead of using it he thrust it into the hands of his startled wife. End of rally. When he found a small but noisy hometown crowd waiting one night at the Phoenix airport, he waved, shook a few hands, managed a thin smile and left. As he did, I heard him hiss at an aide, “Who’s responsible for this?”

Until fall, Johnson maintained a transparent pretext of political virginity: He was too busy being the president to be a politician. He went to dedications, inspections, universities. He proposed his Great Society with its array of social programs, among them Medicare, which he won the next year. After his nomination, that pretense was over. At the Atlantic City convention, the president said America needed a man who would “build a house instead of a ranting, raving demagogue who wants to tear one down.”

He was his own cheerleader, exhorting the street crowds to join his rallies, “Come on down and hear the speakin’.” Sometimes they didn’t have to because he would grab the bullhorn and do some speakin’ right there. On his one foray into Goldwater’s Arizona, Johnson went to Phoenix on a Sunday saying he was going to church there because “this is a day for God, not politics.” Sure it was. He got to the church service two hours late after a tumultuous motorcade with nineteen stops on the way from the airport.

There seldom were crowds big enough to delay Goldwater. He did draw an unexpected turnout at the airport in Charleston, West Virginia, leading his lieutenants to boast that he was showing his appeal in heavily Democratic territory. When I talked with some of the people in the crowd, they said they’d come to see Goldwater’s chartered Boeing 727 jet because they hadn’t seen one there before. Besides, a man added morbidly, they wondered whether the plane would be able to land on the relatively short runway of the mountaintop airport.

It did, and Goldwater went into the city to say that Johnson’s war on poverty was phony and to advocate that welfare recipients work for their checks. Asked what they should do, Goldwater said that in Phoenix they trimmed the dead fronds off the palm trees. There were no palm trees, no fronds, and not enough jobs in West Virginia. Johnson got 68 percent of the vote.

While Goldwater campaigned by chartered jet, sometimes taking the controls himself against federal aviation rules, his running mate, a little-noted congressman named William E. Miller, traveled by turboprop, which took longer and gave him more time to play cards. Goldwater said he picked Miller, an upstate New York representative who had been party chairman, because the man drove Johnson nuts. That wasn’t the case in 1964, when the LBJ Democrats welcomed the nomination of a candidate so anonymous then and later that he wound up appearing in American Express commercials about the power of the card even in the hands of the obscure.

The Miller campaign became a nonstop card game. The plane would taxi to a stop and he’d tell the aides and reporters in the game to put the cards down while he went to make his speech. When he got back they would pick up the hands and resume the game. One stop was in Phoenix, where he met with Goldwater at the airport, returned to the cards and said, “Poor guy thinks he’s going to win.” Late in the campaign, a reporter offered him long odds on a bet for the Republican ticket. “I may be a gambler, but I’m not crazy enough to bet on this election,” Miller said.

Typically, Johnson made a public display of his choice of a running mate, calling decoy candidates to the White House, circling the building for ninety minutes in the August heat one day in a walking news conference at which he talked much but said little about his deliberations. His running mate was the obvious choice, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. Humphrey was a relentless campaigner, loyal to the point of subservience in the campaign and as vice president. He would suffer for it when he ran for president himself in 1968. Goldwater said Humphrey talked in gusts, which he did. His campaign was one long gust, day and night for the LBJ cause.

By late summer, Goldwater was getting negative ratings of 70 percent and worse in the public opinion polls. And the Democrats would soon be piling on with those devastating television attack ads, the mushroom cloud commercials. “Those bomb commercials were the start of dirty political ads on television,” Goldwater wrote. “It was the beginning of what I call electronic dirt.”

The first was the daisy petal ad, which the Democrats broadcast only once, on September 7, during a commercial break in a Gregory Peck movie on NBC. It showed a little girl picking the petals from a daisy, her childish count yielding to a menacing voice counting backward from ten, to a nuclear explosion. Then Johnson’s voice, warning that the election stakes were life or death. No mention of Goldwater. None needed; the target was that clear.

The Johnson campaign did not have to sponsor it again. The television networks rebroadcast it repeatedly as news, the pictures and text were printed in newspapers. Another anti-Goldwater ad showed a little girl licking an ice cream cone, described as polluted by nuclear fallout. A third simply showed two hands tearing up a Social Security card.

Goldwater had no ammunition with which to strike back. Johnson had seen to it that there would be no television debates, no replay of the Kennedy-Nixon series that had seemed likely to become part of the campaign process after 1960. Johnson’s Democrats blocked any possibility of 1964 debates by seeing to it that Congress did not pass legislation to again suspend equal time requirements. Goldwater said he wanted to debate Johnson, but he’d already undercut himself even on that. He had said earlier that he did not think an incumbent president should debate on TV because “I’m fearful that a president in the heat of debate might disclose something that shouldn’t be disclosed.”

So he played out his quirky campaign against “Lyndon Johnson and his curious crew,” a line he started using after what seemed to be a mid-October break for his side. That came when Johnson’s closest personal aide was arrested for disorderly conduct in a homosexual encounter in a men’s room of the Washington YMCA. Word of it soon circulated to the Goldwater camp, but there were no news accounts for five days after the arrest, until the Republicans accused the White House of trying to suppress it. Walter Jenkins resigned and the episode seemed to fit Goldwater’s prior complaints of “moral decay” under Democratic rule. Goldwater said he wouldn’t make an issue of Jenkins’ personal trouble. He raised it by inference but never directly. I asked him what he meant by “curious crew” and he told me I’d have to figure it out myself.

The Jenkins episode came and went quickly; the day after he quit the White House major world events eclipsed it, taking over the front pages. Nikita S. Khrushchev was ousted as leader of the Soviet Union, Communist China announced it had successfully tested a nuclear bomb, and Great Britain changed governments. Even when he wasn’t creating his own misfortunes, Goldwater’s luck was bad.

On election eve, Johnson played his campaign finale to Texas-sized throngs in Houston and Austin. Goldwater’s last campaign stop was in remote Fredonia, Arizona, the good luck town, he said, where he’d concluded his Senate campaigns. He spoke there at dusk, to a crowd that outnumbered the three hundred people who lived in the desert hamlet. He thanked them for coming, especially the Indians, the Hopi and the Navajo. The last words of his campaign: “If there are any Paiutes out there, I want to thank you, too.”

Then he went home to await the inevitable. The Goldwater believers set up an election night headquarters at a resort hotel with a giant blackboard listing the fifty states, to record the unfolding returns. From the time the first ballots were counted, Johnson’s 61 percent landslide was evident. Chalk never touched the blackboard. The numbers were too devastating for the Republicans to post.

I was there to write about Goldwater’s election night, but we never saw him and could only report that he’d taken a walk in the desert before dinner and wasn’t coming out again. It was a short election but a long night for a political reporter surrounded by increasingly angry conservatives who were still capable of ignoring the numbers and shouting that if we hadn’t lied about Goldwater, he would have won. I finally retreated to my room when I heard some Goldwater fans making plans to throw reporters into the swimming pool.

By election night in my first full campaign season, I was starting to gain a reputation as a political reporter, especially inside the AP. I didn’t realize it until the Phoenix bureau sent a reporter to help me at Goldwater headquarters. I’d been on the road for a week, wearing the same threadbare, black, double-knit suit, which by then was so bedraggled and soup-stained that it wasn’t worth the price of getting it dry-cleaned. My helper aimed to please. There wasn’t much going on, but I had to keep the story updated with new leads, based on comments from Goldwater aides, on the mood and scene, on whatever I could find to report. I’d write them and give them to the local guy to dictate for me while I looked for more information. I wrote five leads and each time I did, he’d tell me how great the writing had been, the adjectives getting more effusive as the night went on. By the last of them, he’d run out of superlatives for my copy. He looked at me for a moment and then he said, “That’s a nice suit you’re wearing.” I had to choke down the laugh; it hadn’t been that long since I was the local bureau guy trying to impress the national reporter.

Goldwater stayed at home and did not emerge to issue his redundant concession until the next day. After a brief break he flew back to Washington, one last trip on his chartered jet. One last chance to break the rules, take the controls and land the 727, which he did. The plane banged into the runway at Dulles International Airport and bounced back into the air. Another bang as the tires hit and the plane jumped again. Then it settled back down on the runway. I spotted Goldwater in the cockpit and caught him before we left. “That first landing was exciting but the third one was pretty smooth,” I said. He smiled and growled at the same time.